okay, i’m just putting this out here because it needs to be said and i’m sick of letting the bullshit train continue when i could help stop – or at least bring attention to – it. i have a friend who is diplegic and therefore uses a manual chair (her twin was also quadriplegic and in a motorized chair) and when we watch movies with wheelchairs in them, we like to critique the designs.
do you know why mcavoy couldn’t/can’t drive his motorized wheelchair? BECAUSE THE FUCKING WHEELS ARE ON THE WRONG WAY. HANK MCCOY, WHO IS SUPPOSEDLY A “GENIUS”, DESIGNED THE WHEELCHAIR SO THE BIG WHEELS ARE ON THE FRONT AND THE SMALL WHEELS ARE ON THE BACK.
LOOK!
LOOK AT THIS ABSOLUTE BULLSHIT. DO YOU KNOW WHY HE CAN’T DRIVE IT? THE SMALL WHEELS ARE AT THE FRONT BECAUSE THEY ARE SMALL AND THEREFORE ALLOW FOR LOTS OF FINE CONTROL, AND THE BIG WHEELS ARE AT THE BACK BECAUSE THEY OFFER POWER. WHEN THE BIG WHEELS ARE ON THE FRONT IT IS SO DIFFICULT TO CONTROL WHERE YOU ARE GOING. IT’S LIKE WHEN YOU WALK BACKWARDS ON A BIKE AND TRY TO STEER STILL WITH THE HANDLEBARS. I SAT BACKWARDS ON MY FRIEND’S MANUAL CHAIR AND TRIED TO WHEEL MYSELF. IT WAS LIKE COMPLETELY REWIRING MY MOTOR SKILLS EVERY SECOND I WAS MOVING. IT. IS. BULLSHIT. AND ALL OF CHARLES’ CHAIRS ARE LIKE THIS!!! HANK!!!!! WTF!!!!!!!
ALSO. Charles would have THE WORST backpain from that stiff-ass unnecessary fuckin metal backrest that goes all the way up. YOU KNOW HOW PEOPLE’S BACKS GET UNCOMFORTABLE WHEN SITTING FOR HOURS ON A LONG PLANE OR CAR RIDE???? YOU KNOW THAT FEELING??? THAT FEELING IS THIS CHARLES’ LIFE, OKAY. HIS BACK HAS TO BE UNNATURALLY STRAIGHT ALL THE TIME. THIS CRITIQUE IS TAKEN FROM MY FRIEND’S EXPERIENCE BECAUSE SHE ALSO HAS A HARD BACK CHAIR AND HAS BEEN TOLD SHE’S GOING TO HAVE AWFUL BACK AND SHOULDER PROBLEMS BECAUSE OF IT. YET HARD BACKS ARE STANDARD AND SLING BACKS – LIKE THE ONE I’M GOING TO SHOW YOU IN A SECOND – ARE NOT! THIS IS BECAUSE THE WHEELCHAIR-GETTING SYSTEM IS COMPLETELY BROKEN AND IT’S SOMETHING YOU SHOULD REALLY CARE ABOUT BUT IT IS A RANT FOR ANOTHER DAY). THE POINT IS, CHARLES’ BACK IS ONE HURTIN’ UNIT IN THIS CHAIR I GUARANTEE YOU. HE OBVIOUSLY DOESN’T NEED IT FOR TRUNK CONTROL. HE HAS AMAZINGLY FREE RANGE OF MOVEMENT ABOVE HIS HIPS. THIS CHAIR IS B U L L S H I T. HE CAN’T DRIVE, HE CAN’T SIT UP IN A COMFORTABLE WAY. POOR BABY IS H U R T I N G but right, Hank’s ~~a genius~~
In contrast, look at this chair!
Look at those tiny-ass wheels on the front! The user of this could spin ON A DIME. It’s Nice as Fuck. Look at that back. (Okay I’m not 1000% certain it’s a slingback) but it doesn’t go all the way up the user’s back! That’s some free-range-of-movement-let-your-spine-do-almost-anything-it-wants-shit right there. Since Charles pretty clearly has full use of his trunk in the movies, this would make much more sense. Also, Ann (friend) and I really don’t see why he would want an electric wheelchair when he clearly could have a manual one that allows for even more control.
AND OKAY, all wheelchairs should be specific to their users. Some people need more back support. In Ann’s quadriplegic brother’s chair there was a neck brace and little wing things on the side that came out and clamped around his body. Some people’s foot rests need to go out like Charles’ does (whether or not he requires this is kind of foggy, espc. since the overall design is so. asinine.). Some need their footrests to be more in like the orange chair. Some people get tilted wheels, some people don’t. (Also the process for deciding this is bullshit – on government insurance they will only build your chair with the assumption that you will never leave your house and therefore it’s almost impossible to get ‘add ons’ like sling backs and tilted wheels and under-the-seat brakes WHICH SHOULD BE STANDARD, AGAIN, BECAUSE IF YOU DON’T HAVE THEM YOU COULD HAVE MORE MEDICAL ISSUES DOWN THE ROAD OMG THIS SYSTEM IS SO BROKEN).
But I think we can ALL fucking agree that your wheels should go on the goddamn correct way so you can, you know, steer. And that maybe your chair should be designed more like a mobility assistance device than a fucking 1860′s gentleman’s club wingback for no goddamn earthly reason.
SHIT this stuff gets me riled up.
wow this is really interesting and makes a lot of sense! New headcanon is that Charles only uses the ridiculous X-chair when he’s teaching a class but the second he has spare time he settles into a wheelchair like the one below and just goes “aahhhhhhhh”
@spiftynifty is absolutely right, I was about to criticise his wheelchair as well, but then I noticed that he uses a completely different one when he is actually outside with Hank and Summers brothers (sorry for super bad quality)
Let me reblog this with an addition because YOU SHOULD STILL ABSOLUTELY CRITICIZE HIS WHEELCHAIR. Yes, he uses the manual wheelchair outside. Wanna know why?
Regular motorized wheelchairs are REALLY REALLY heavy. Charles’ motorized chair, even if its a light weight alloy, is made ENTIRELY out of metal. It’s probably too heavy for wheeling through gravel and across the lawn. He would sink. Also, let me re-iterate, ITS WHEELS ARE CONSTRUCTED ENTIRELY TOO POORLY TO HAVE ANY CONTROL WHATSOEVER. THE *WHEELS* ARE GODDAMN METAL, IMAGINE WHEN ITS ICY OUTSIDE. YEAH. YEAH, IT’S NOT GOOD. And when it’s not icy and he’s trying to wheel across the grass with those stupid-ass wheels – into the pond he goes. Also, Hank put the motor like one fucking inch off the goddamn ground so when the HEAVY WHEELCHAIR inevitably SINKS………. Yeah. Charles is up the creek without a paddle.
As for this manual chair, it is also subpar. Although the wheels are mercifully in the right place, it looks too small for him. The wheels need to come up higher so that when he wheels himself, the rim grips are right there. Also, his arms should be able to go back pretty far on the wheels. Where they are now, you can only get a little bit behind your hips (again, speaking from experience). The high back on this chair AGAIN restricts his movement in this aspect. Charles probably will have shoulder pain that may result in surgery down the road with this chair (because it looks SO MUCH like Ann’s chair and that’s exactly what Ann has been told will happen to her).
Second of all: I understand you’re just trying to make canon work and are not being bad people (please believe me, I know this), but absolutely no disabled person should have to switch chairs for mobility purposes multiple times a day. These chairs should be built for every day needs.Is wheeling on carpet a bitch with a manual chair? YOU BETCHA! Easy fix: take away the rugs; it’s Charles’ house. Is it more exhausting to go up hills in a manual? Oh my god, I don’t know how people do it, it is the worst. But maybe that’s a struggle that should be shown, instead of magically having him transfer to a new chair whenever a new problem arises? Think: would you like to cart around 47 different mobility devices that you would have to transfer in and out of just because your house and/or your chair, is not built for your life convenience? Maybe they should just build the chair better.It is a part of Charles and it always will be. BUILD. IT. BETTER.
Charles is lucky enough to be a multimillionare with his own lab/engineer to build chairs for him. Hank is 100% capable of making a chair that would defy any disabled person’s wildest dreams. Except…. it’s apparently more important that we just make the chair “look cool”. Never mind that 1. It doesn’t, 2. WHEELCHAIRS THAT WORK FOR DISABLED PEOPLE ACTUALLY CAN LOOK COOL TOO!! WHAT A CONCEPT.
I am just sick and tired of the way disabled people are portrayed in film and media 99% of the time. Wheelchairs are not sick gadgets to do whatever the fuck you want with. They are actual mobility devices that millions of people use, and truthfully representing the lives of those people is important. And hey, wheelchairs are fucking cool! They don’t need art direction to make them be chill! They just need good design, that again, reflects the ACTUAL LIFE the character lives. These are MOBILITY ASSISTANCE DEVICES. They are their legs. It is completely impractical and inconsiderate to think that a disabled person should just hop from chair to chair whenever the need arises.
Well, that was almost a spiritual experience. Thank you for that, madneto. I learned a ton from your righteous wrath.
Once again, this post provides a handy guide for first-time wheelchair users for what to look for in fit.
Random aside that highlights the individuality of wheelchairs… I absolutely can’t use a manual wheelchair to propel myself because the problem that makes walking difficulty means that repetitive stress on my arms and shoulders is equally problematic. Like it’s easier for me to walk than use a manual wheelchair and that’s not saying much. For me the magic “perfect” chair would have to allow me to be upright or almost fully reclined, while allowing indoors, outdoors and stairs. As it is, I mostly stay home, use electric carts in grocery stores, and if I must travel, we rent a scooter and I end up in pain anyway due to the posture it requires. Thankfully I can still walk short distances, usually. But the right device is the difference between being housebound and being in the world.
has gotten a lot of flack, and I don’t disagree that it could and should have been handled a lot better, but even as it is, I really really like what it says, or rather, confirms about
Bucky.
ok a followup from my irony post: one of the things i love most about steve rogers as seen in the mcu is that he doesn’t do the thing that ‘feels right’ or looks most virtuous or american or whatever, he’s not sentimental, he knows what hell is like because he has been there and it’s called the western front. he grew up sick and poor and irish catholic when there was no kindness for those things in the american narrative, he is not the kind of guy who thinks everything will turn out okay if you just believe in yourself.
he doesn’t do what he feels is the right thing, he does what he decides is the right thing. and sometimes it feels terrible, and has terrible consequences. at no point in ‘civil war’, for instance, does he seem to think his decision is The Right Choice and tony’s is Wrong. he knows there was no right answer, only two wrong ones, and he picked the one he could live with. and people bled for it.
i wouldn’t say he’s a ‘logic’ character, he’s not that trope, but he is secretly, subtly, ruthlessly thoughtful.
so when he does something like, say, become a fugitive from the entire world within minutes of hearing there’s a shoot-first order out on bucky, it’s not that blind emotional panic that drives so many heroes. it’s as cold and unstoppable as a glacier.
an emotionally driven hero has, inherently, a sense of entitlement about the outcome of their choices. if you believe in your friends, if you tell the truth when you ought to lie, if you refuse to take the kill shot because heroes don’t kill, things will definitely turn out okay in the end somehow. and of course the narrative always supports this, because that’s the genre, that’s the trope set. there’s no room for a counterpoint in their universe.
and then there’s captain fucking america.
look, i’m sleep-deprived and haven’t planned this post out at all so it’s probably kind of a mess, but what i’m getting at here is that the ‘golden boy’ of superheroes, the star spangled man with a plan, this corny, schmaltzy, old-timey character, isn’t light because the darkness hasn’t touched him. he’s light because he set his jaw and marched into the darkness and he set it the fuck on fire.
Okay but…can we all take a moment and just realize that fandom’s not the problem with Agent Carter’s ratings? (Sorry, Anon, this has been stewing for a while.)
Like, yes, I will absolutely namedrop it a couple of times a week, but I am seeing a lot of posts that border on berating fans over Agent Carter’s supposed failure to thrive, and I have a couple of issues with it.
One: Do we really think fans not watching is the problem? Every fan I know is watching and talking about and trending and posting gifs of this show. If Agent Carter isn’t doing well, can we stop yelling at each other over it? We are supporting the fuck out of this show and I’m gettin’ pretty tired of the implication that if Agent Carter fails, it was the fans’ fault. Fandom is backing this show. Fandom is also tiny compared to the general population. It’s not the fans who aren’t watching. It’s everyone else.
OR IS IT?
Two: Let’s look at the actual ratings, shall we?
Ratings for Tuesday, February 3rd: For its time slot, Agent Carter beat out everything else on network television except NCIS. [Source] It beat out New Girl and Supernatural. So what the fuck?
Between January 27th and February 3rd: Ratings were flat, which means Agent Carter didn’t drop, and it didn’t rise. [Source] And again, it did better than EVERY NETWORK SHOW except NCIS. (Which, wow, NCIS LA is really the most watched show in that time slot? Maybe Agent Carter is in the wrong demo slot.)
So is it the fans that are the issue?
Or is it the studio that never planned to give this show a chance, and the news coverage that’s saying Agent Carter’s tanking when it is, in fact, doing pretty fuckin’ well for a first-season “miniseries” show in a Sunday night slot up against NCIS and Supernatural?
Like, maybe there are serious talks of it being cancelled or not renewed. I don’t follow entertainment news super closely. But it’s probably not the actual numbers impacting that, which means even if as fans we somehow manage to raise MILLIONS more viewers to raise the numbers, which I don’t think we will, they may not care.
Three: Some people are finding the show deeply problematic racewise, and I see their point. I’m seeing people who want to love this show unable to do so because they feel erased and belittled both by the show and by the shouting about the show, the shouting that is, in some cases, shouting them down. So if you don’t want to support it, or if you’re angry at it, that’s okay too. You are under no social obligation to fandom to back something that is hurting you. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a problem in fandom, not you.
IN CONCLUSION, can we stop telling ourselves Agent Carter lives or dies by our word? Because it is literally, right now, living out the old adage that a woman has to work twice as hard as a man to be considered half as good, and that’s not our fault.
In the world of superheroes, because it’s such a melodramatic world with operatic undertones to it, most of the best ones have some sort of tragedy, deformity, or disability that is meant to add depth and poignancy to their heroism, whether that’s Bruce Wayne sobbing over his parents’ bodies or Bruce Banner forced to live a life of emotional repression in order to keep his dark side at bay. You could argue that Peggy’s cross to bear is Steve’s death, but we’d argue right back that she’s mourning him in a more or less normal, human way and her grief seems to be following a healthy evolution. No vows to dress like a flying rat over his grave or anything. She’s just taken what she’s learned from him and letting his memory inspire her. No, her cross is even more basic than that. In order to protect her mission from her co-workers, Peggy has to become the bumbling, ineffective Clark Kent/Peter Parker type, hiding her victories and strength from the very people she so desperately wants to notice them. And because this show is using the patriarchal and chauvinistic attitudes of the day as a backdrop for this story, Peggy’s sacrifice becomes all that much more poignant. She has to pretend to be dumber than she is and take no credit for her work in front of a group of men who already think it’s an insult that she be allowed to work alongside them at all. Peggy Carter’s kryptonite IS the patriarchy.
It’s, like, maybe canon. Let’s get that out of the way. It’s in a canon grey area. I’m not telling anyone to consider it canon. If you’d rather not, cool, ignore this post.
What stands out to me about these images is
the bathtub used as a kitchen table,
the interior windows, &
the way one room leads directly from the other, railroad-flat style, with an inner room that has two doors but no large visible window.
To start: that bathtub.
A bathtub in the kitchen is quintessentiallytenementliving. Not that people were assuming Steve was living in the Dakota, but, just as a starting point: he wasn’t spending big bucks on rent. He was probably not in a great neighborhood. He seems to have been lower middle class or poor. This can mean anything — you can be poor and still afford to eat and buy clothes, you can be poor and have none of that — there’s a lot of room in “poor,” and not everyone who lived in what we consider a tenement was huddling with others for warmth in the winter, sadly reflecting on their Extreme Poverty, or coughing and starving all the time.
But still. Here he lives in a tenement. Which doesn’t tell us a lot. What kind of tenement?
There were and are different kinds of tenements in NYC. They can be put into three distinct groups: pre-law tenements, old law tenements, and new law tenements. There are some variations, but generally they get summed up like this:
1. Pre-law tenements were built prior to 1879. They were mostly built in Manhattan, and they were usually 3 rooms per apartment, with little light and no ventilation. Only one room would face the street and have a window. The inner rooms would not have windows. In the 1860s, a law was passed mandating windows for each room. So builders inserted windows between the rooms, which, as you can probably guess, accomplished precisely nothing.
2. Old law tenements were built after the first big tenement house law of 1879. They were a little stricter on the windows. After 1879, you had to have exterior windows. But the law didn’t specify where windows had to be, so somebody designed what was called the “dumbbell” tenement. The “dumbbell” tenement looked like this:
Note that the kitchen has two doors, one to another bedroom, one to the hall. It also opens onto a room along the exterior of the building (the living room if you’re living in the front, and a bedroom if you’re living in the back). Also note that the window in the kitchen is tiny because even though it technically faces the exterior, that exterior is just a small airshaft. Which people ended up dumping their garbage in. So. So much for ventilation.
Finally, we get:
3. New law tenements. These were built after 1901, and maybe we can thank Jacob Riis for them, I don’t know. I have a lot of relatives who still live in what were once new law tenements, but they call them “pre-war” because that sounds nicer. They are still, strictly speaking, fairly crappy in terms of design, but they were an improvement. Any room in a tenement built after 1901 had to have at least one window opening directly onto the street or a yard or court. So no more garbage shaft windows. And no more design that rested on inner rooms with no possible air or light source.
So why is this all interesting to me in light of this concept art?
Because this art doesn’t just put Steve in a tenement; it puts him in an older tenement. I’d say an old law “dumbbell” tenement is likeliest, probably upgraded to include interior windows after 1901. His kitchen has two doors: one could open onto another bedroom (or two), and the door off to the side could access the hall. He doesn’t appear to have a window in his kitchen, but for all we know he could have a tiny aperture tucked behind the cabinets that accesses some kind of inner shaft — a “window” for purposes of the 1879 law.
Also, there’s a good chance that he doesn’t live alone.
It’s pretty momentous that I’m saying this. I’m the biggest ever hater of Steve and Bucky’s Lovenest. Like. The biggest. When people tell me that it’s irrefutable “canon” that Steve lived with Bucky, I calmly nod and then resort to my hate corner sipping on my haterade throwing a hate ball, rolling in my hate. I won’t go over why I think the TWS film doesn’t mandate that they have to live together. I’ll just put it out there: I don’t enjoy a reading that insists on it. I like Steve and Bucky, I like them together, but a dynamic that insists they absolutely did move in together and that there was no other purpose for the flashback scene but to toss them into the same bed space is… not how I read that movie.
But I have to give it to everyone who was writing that fic: they could share an apartment. Hell, Steve is probably sharing his apartment with someone, or maybe even two someones. Let’s look at that floorplan again, this time marked a little differently:
Whether you think he’s in the front of the building or the back, the bedroom for Steve appears to be what’s marked as the ‘parlor’ (which, hey, he gets fire escape access, good for him). So someone else will probably be in the other room, the room that the door in the kitchen/living room opens onto. Is it Bucky? Arnie Roth? Both of them? Bucky and Bucky’s sister? Two randos Steve met on the subway one day? Maybe the Barnes family lives in the front-facing apartment and Steve moved into the back to be close to them?
I figure any of these options will work if you want to write fic that takes this concept art into account; the point is really that Steve has a whole other room in there, and he’s presumably doing something with it. Maybe it’s an art studio and he does live alone. Maybe it is, in fact, Bucky’s room. I don’t think this stuff forecloses any possibilities; that’s what’s fun about it. Steve’s apartment can still say whatever you want it to say about him.
(For me, it’s interesting to think about him in an apartment that reflects decades and decades of the least amount of legally-mandated benefit to people. Welcome to the U S A. Would you like a garbage shaft building? Your options are a garbage shaft building.)
Lars Anderson studied historical manuals and rediscovered an ancient and extremely fast way of firing arrows from a bow, making icons like Legolas and Katniss look like slugs.
He trained himself to be able to perform such feats as firing three arrows in less than a second, catching an arrow and firing it back, splitting an oncoming arrow in two, and basically debunking all the lies hollywood has fed us about “ultimate archery skills”
HOLY CRAP historical archery is SO MUCH COOLER than anything out there now.
does this check out? Seems to spend a lot of time talking about how unusually talented this particular guy is.
Good grief, this reply grew more than somewhat. It looks more like a magazine article. Have fun!
All opinions are my own, based on library and personal knowledge; if there’s scholarly evidence to the contrary, links please!
…BEGIN…
Things certainly check out for Lars Anderson (or Andersen), who seems to be the Annie Oakley of archery. But someone should have warned him that the “Robin Hood: Men in Tights“ pose…
…looks just as silly in real life…
Maybe that’s why a lot of what I watched made me think of of Annie Oakley again, and circus “trick shooting”…
Really interesting meta commentary by @peternorwood digging into the history of archery (was this style really lost?) and why not everything is as it appears.
Okay, here’s my thing about this scene and it hit me when I first watched it but has taken me a while (and some conversation) to put into words.
Peggy, for a moment, seems rather uncomfortable with the idea of stealing food, where the other girls encourage it, even praising each other for it. This to me, seems to underline a real cultural difference. Peggy, having grown up in England with the rationing and the Blitz spirit, would have had a very much ‘make, do and mend’ mindset. What you had, you shared. Stealing or fiddling rations was not only very frowned upon by others, but could be punishable.
The American girls, on the flipside, probably grew up young in the Depression. When there was food, you took it and you took as much as you could, because who knows when it would be there again? They have made ingenious solutions to avoid waste, and to avoid hunger. They eat like women who have known what it feels like to not have anything to fill a hungry belly.
That being said, I don’t think less of either set of women. I just think it’s an interesting dichotomy.
Mostly, of course, yay lady friendships and MOAR PLEASE.
YES ALL OF THIS. It’s a total two-nations-divided thing, on one hand you’ve got the full on stiff upper lip oh no thanks awfully i’ve had quite enough versus, GIRL ARE YOU SERIOUS LEMME FILL YOUR HANDBAG WITH GRAVY.
Also, I love how surprised and impressed Peggy is by their resourcefulness. All the food-swiping would be the kind of thing you’d expect an observant spy to spot instantly, so the fact she hasn’t suggests to me that she’s either been absent from a lot of mealtimes or too wrapped up in her own concerns. And it leads me to hope this is the start of her becoming more integrated into the Griffith circle because LADY FRIENDSHIPS.
Also also I know having a moment where all the Griffith girls band together to get Peggy out of a jam like some sort of Voltron of Moxie would be as cheesy as hell but I STILL WANT IT
yes yes but most importantly CHICKEN POCKET
THIS WAS MY FAVORITE SCENE
Rather than being due to country of origin I think a lot of this comes down to class. Peggy is posh and probably went to a posh school. I doubt she ever went really hungry until she was out on missions. By the time rationing came around she probably would have been working for the SSR and probably got more rations than the general public. I haven’t actually seen Agent Carter yet so I’m only going on info available from other stuff but I doubt Peggy grew up not knowing where her next meal would come from. Also while there was make do and mend mentality and you shared what you had with you and yours there was a huge amount of crime and black market stuff during the war/Blitz. I’m sure there was a lot of getting what ever you could and everyone else can get stuffed.
And yet fanfiction is an inherently transformative work which, by its very nature, strives to address or change some flaw that exists in canon, even if that flaw is “why isn’t there more of this thing?!” Fanfiction has addressed the lack of gay men by making straight characters gay; it’s addressed countless cultural misappropriations with wildly varying AUs; it’s addressed canon plot holes and timeline issues with fix-it fics and crossovers. Fanfic is the show your show could be like, if only you dared to dream.
But for all its transformative nature, fanfiction and fandom still suffer from a real dearth of femslash. Beyond the simple fact that very few girls exist in canon materials, the societal emphasis on the male gaze seems to have affected fanficcers’ creativity to such an extent that even in our own fantasies, we cannot give women a fair shake. Just as the answer to “Why is there so much slash?” cannot be boiled down to “ Well, straight girls are horny”, the answer to “Why isn’t there any femslash?” cannot be boiled down to “Well, straight girls don’t care.” The bias against female characters and female pleasure is an ingrained, institutionalized problem which won’t go away on its own.
knitting in the dark 
